Podcast Transcript | Cantonese: How Do You Say “What is Your Name?”

Today, you will be learning a couple of phrases for introduction in Cantonese, namely “你好,我個名叫” and “你叫咩名”.

For the first phrase “你好,我個名叫” means “Hello! My name is…”.

Let me break it down for you. “你好” as what we learnt in our previous lesson, means “Hello” while “名” refers to “name” and “叫” means “called”. So technically, 我個名叫 means “my name is called”.

In my case, I would say “你好,我個名叫Eugene”.

Now pause the audio and give it a try. 你好,我個名叫 <your name>.

Isn’t it great that you have learnt how to introduce your own name? Now, conversations are always 2 ways and if you have introduced yourself, wouldn’t you want to find out the name of whom you are speaking to as well? In this case, you would ask “你叫咩名?” which means “What is your name?”

Once again, 你叫咩名?

Now, let’s go over the 2 phrases again.

你好,我個名叫… and

你叫咩名?

There you go! Besides learning how to introduce yourself, you are beginning to learn how to strike a conversation!

Remember, practice is the key. Don’t be afraid to start speaking in Cantonese! In the next post, you will learn other common conversation phrases and expressions.

Our Philosophy for Learning Cantonese in Singapore

At LearnDialect.sg, we want to make learning Cantonese fun, easy and practical for daily conversations in Singapore. As such, rather than figuring out which of the 10 or more Cantonese romanization system to use (e.g. Jyutping, Yale or Cantonese Pinyin etc.), we encourage you to form your own phonics, so that you make an association with these Cantonese words in the quickest way possible. To illustrate, the romanization of the English word, “eat”, is “Sik” using Jyutping and “Sihk” using Yale. However, in our “Have You Eaten?” podcast transcript, you’ll find that we use “sek“, which we think relates to us better. That said, you may use other romanization (e.g “sake”, “xig“, etc), as long as it helps you to make sense of what you hear.

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